1. Field of Art
The present invention generally relates to the field of system management, in particular to information technology (IT) assets and services discovery, IT search, and change management.
2. Description of the Related Art
A network typically includes a variety of interconnected component systems (also referred to as component systems, network/service elements). Each of the component systems provides one or more services and works together with the rest to collectively provide aggregate services to users. For example, in Voice Over IP service (VoIP), session border controllers work in conjunction with gateways, phones, billing systems, Domain Name System (DNS) servers, Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS)/Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication servers, and underlying IP infrastructure, to constantly validate and ensure that phones can be registered, that phone calls can be made, that the caller is authenticated, and that the phone calls are billed properly.
Because component systems can be added, removed, and changed (e.g., reconfiguration, patching, upgrading) overtime, the landscape of a network evolves overtime. In addition, because of the interdependent nature of the component systems, changes made in one component system (e.g., configuration changes) can inadvertently affect other component systems dependent upon it. The unintended impact can cause inter-component dependencies to breakdown and thereby break the service. Therefore, it is important to track the component systems and their status and functional relationships.
Traditional best practice techniques of managing hosts on a network and their configurations are summarized in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). In the context of asset management, such technologies mostly revolve around node-based views of the network. Tremendous efforts have gone in to enumerate and list out what's on the network and when it was provisioned. Unfortunately, such efforts have mostly resulted in a static spreadsheet view of the network that has to be manually updated. This is not only laborious, but also error prone. In the context of change management, such technologies mostly revolve around Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) based monitoring, log-based management-by-exception, and Change Management DataBase (or Configuration Management DataBase, CMDB). SNMP-based monitoring provides a large amount of details without revealing the configuration and supported services of the underlying component system. Log management records what has happened in the underlying component system without revealing the actual impacts or the causes. CMDB typically involves a spreadsheet for network operators to track configuration changes manually, which is both tedious and error prone. In addition, the traditional way of enumerating applications within known hosts involves installing agents in each of the known hosts which further explore and discover applications, file systems and other aspects internal to the host. This approach is defective because installing agents on hosts are intrusive and can potentially destabilize the hosts.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for automatically discovering network components and their statuses and functional relationships in real time.